Somewhere Else to Be
by vodka straight
Summary: He’s afraid that he’s turned her into a President’s wife. She's afraid that she's no one's wife at all. Set around "Jefferson Lives"


Somewhere Else to Be  
  
This is the way they are. As much as it sounds like a movie mantra. This is the way they are.   
  
There is a two-foot distance between them as she realizes how much she wants to move through it.  
  
They are always like this. Through dating, through marriage, through what feels like thousands of years.   
  
She tells herself it's because they are adults. Because she is a doctor and he is a president, and they're both navigating their fifties gracefully. She tells herself that it's not because she feels the weight of regret and embarrassment, because after all these thousands of years she still can't read him sometimes. She still can't read herself.  
  
She doesn't know if she's strong enough. She doesn't know if he is. She doesn't know if she's *sure* enough. She's not sure that she can risk showing real pain, or showing the real need to be held. What if she's the only one who needs it?  
  
She still can't be positively sure that if she runs to him, he'll catch her. And walking toward him now is like walking through ice. And she can't.   
  
***  
  
He knows she only gets this way because she gives a fuck. He knows the kind of love they have, the kind of lives they live and the way they manage it. He knows that she doesn't want him to have MS. He knows that there are things that she would give or do that defy imagination.   
  
He can feel that want in her. He can taste it in the air that she exhales.   
  
There are tears in her eyes, as there often are, but he can't remember the last time he'd seen one shed, and it makes him sad.   
  
He's afraid that he's turned her into a President's wife.   
  
"It's better than being a priest's wife." She had said sarcastically, once upon a time when they were just talking. Just talking, that was all.  
  
Just talking.   
  
This wasn't a little thing like that anymore. This was his life, winding down, and his last chance to change something wonderful. This was his wife, wondering why something he had never needed before he had it now seemed so damn necessary. This was about his job becoming his family, and his family becoming a task, and it was about the world and how much it took to make a dent in anything.  
  
You just can't do that in four years. He just couldn't. He's just now realizing that he loves this.   
  
He's also realizing that the people around him may need this more than he does.   
  
Leo.   
  
Toby.   
  
Josh would be shocked that there had ever even been a question.   
  
CJ would just get bitter.   
  
They would all be bitter if they ever found out how much he'd lied to them. He wasn't lying to himself, he never had. He might be the one person he hadn't lied to yet. He wasn't completely sure that they wouldn't all just walk away right there.   
  
He keeps waiting for someone to just ask. Come up to him in the hall, throw it at him near the end of a press conference. As low-maintenance as all that. Yes. I have MS. Yes. Lies of omission, yes. Nothing too it. Yes. I have MS.   
  
He wants it even, a little.   
  
More than that he wants Abby to he his wife again. Not the First Lady, not someone packing for Beijing or Switzerland but someone who was just *here*, just for a moment. Just only right *here*.   
  
***  
  
And of course, she just wants him to remember that once upon a time he really was just hers and no one else's. And what now? Now she has no claim? Now this thing, this office, this prospect of a *legacy* has seduced him away from her like a snake charmed from his coil? Is it really that easy? Is it really that rawly sinister? Is it possible that she can't fight something that ominous and blunt?   
  
She just wants him to remember a promise that was for him to begin with.   
  
A promise that was made before there was somewhere else for her to be.   
  
A sad thing that just made her think more and more about the differences, more and more about when he was hers and no one else held sway. It was a promise that, if fulfilled could bring it all back.   
  
Could make him hers again.   
  
***  
  
Except that he wasn't anymore. Not hers. Not only hers.   
  
fin 


End file.
